Unspeak
Page 17
Another problem with the word ‘terrorist’ as a noun, rather than an adjective, is that it becomes merely a generalised word of abuse, much like ‘fascist’ has done. He is a fascist because he wants to stop me from smoking, or hunting foxes, or driving fast; she is a terrorist because, well, she just disagrees with me in one way or another. The infantile American TV and radio host Bill O’Reilly, who regularly screams ‘Shut up!’ at his invited guests, has called the American Civil Liberties Union ‘terrorists’68 (and, for good measure, ‘fascists’).69 According to author Rebecca Hagelin, MTV, sex education in schools, and internet pornography all combine in one terrifying phenomenon of ‘cultural terrorism’.70 And on a TV chat show, Richard Perle, who at the time was chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, described the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh as ‘the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist’.71 When pressed on this choice of abusive terminology, Perle said: ‘Because he sets out to do damage and he will do it by whatever innuendo, whatever distortion he can.’ This is alarming: if ‘innuendo’ and ‘distortion’ now make you a terrorist, then people who make sexual jokes or turn up their guitar amplifiers are terrorists, too.
Perle equates Hersh’s speech with terrorism; Osama bin Laden, in a 1998 television interview, equated terrorism with speech: ‘They kill and murder our brothers. They compromise our honour and our dignity and dare we utter a single word of protest against the injustice, we are called terrorists.’72 This is a whine of epic disingenuousness. The destruction of buildings and mass killing is something more than uttering a single word. (Unless, perhaps, it is the word of God.) Those who deplore murder – and Perle is presumably to be included among their number – ought to insist on that distinction rather than trying to elide it.
Just as deflationary of the currency of ‘terrorist’ is the extent to which the word has actually become, especially in cultural discussion, a word of approval, signalling an edgy willingness to shock complacent audiences, to disrupt commercial structures, or just to be rude. People from John Lydon to Bill Drummond and Damien Hirst have been called ‘art terrorists’, even though the last is the most establishment of modern artists, and a man called AK47, who steals bits of British public sculpture, applies the label proudly to himself.73 Perhaps it’s time to retire the word ‘terrorist’ for good. Or wait, maybe we could start a war against it.
War on terror
It was a phrase exquisitely engineered for public consumption. Revealingly, they didn’t use it themselves: within the US military and intelligence world, it was known as GWOT, for Global War On Terrorism, which at least made for a more satisfying acronym. The public, however, needed something with fewer syllables, something snappier. So ‘war on terror’ it was, and so George W. Bush announced it, on 20 September 2001.
The US had not declared war on fear itself, since Hollywood still made slasher movies and funfair ghost trains did not become illegal. Rather, the war was supposed to be against terrorism. In fact, a ‘war against international terrorism’ had already been declared in March 1981 by Reagan’s Secretary of State, Alexander Haig. (Aptly, John Arbuthnot wrote two centuries earlier that there were some ‘Political Lies’ which, ‘like your Insects, die and revive again in a different Form’.)74 But the idea made no more sense back then either. Wars are things you have against nation states. Terrorism is a tactic of violence. The idea of a war against a tactic is blatantly absurd: it is like declaring war against sniping, or war against high-altitude bombing. As former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski writes: ‘No one, for instance, would have declared at the outset of the Second World War that the war was being fought against “blitzkrieg”.’75 Sir Harold Walker, the UK’s former Ambassador to Iraq and one of the fifty-two who signed the letter to Tony Blair, says that ‘war on terror’ ‘is a very prejudicial and ill-chosen phrase, because it’s impossible to have a war on a technique. Terrorism is a technique, it’s not a state or a building or a soldier, it’s a technique, so logically it’s rather difficult to have a war on terrorism. You can have a war on certain terrorists, certain people who use terrorist techniques.’76
So much is clear, and must have been clear to the person who coined the phrase ‘war on terror’. The interesting question is why it was nevertheless thought useful. When Bush announced it, he said: ‘Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign unlike any other we have ever seen.’77 Campaign was the mot juste: as in advertising campaign, or propaganda campaign, or even, perhaps, campaign for re-election. The ‘war on terror’ prepares the public for a potentially indefinite state of emergency. In March 2002, the US Department of Homeland Security unveiled a new colour-coded ‘Advisory System’, indicating the current threat of terrorism. It has five possible settings, but the lowest two have never been used: the nationwide threat level has been at either yellow (‘Significant Risk of Terrorist Attacks’) or orange (’High Risk of Terrorist Attacks’) ever since.78 ‘Raising the threat condition has economic, physical, and psychological effects on the nation,’ comments the Advisory System’s internet page.79 Maybe it is precisely those ‘psychological effects’ that are desired. The first Secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, has stated that ‘some people’ often insisted on raising the threat level against his wishes:
Ridge said he wanted to ‘debunk the myth’ that his agency was responsible for repeatedly raising the alert under a color-coded system he unveiled in 2002. ‘More often than not we were the least inclined to raise it,’ Ridge told reporters. ‘Sometimes we disagreed with the intelligence assessment. Sometimes we thought even if the intelligence was good, you don’t necessarily put the country on (alert)… . There were times when some people were really aggressive about raising it, and we said, “For that?”’80
One might suppose that the repeated use of the blunt substantives ‘war on terror’, along with official threat alerts that according to the nation’s security chief were not warranted, is simply part of a strategy not to dispel fear but actually to induce it. Consider the language of an official leaflet about the threat of terrorism which was distributed to the British public in 2004: under the heading ‘Possible signs of terrorism’, it says: ‘Terrorists need […] A place to live: Are you suspicious about any tenants or guests?’81 Being suspicious of neighbours had always been a great British pastime; now apparently it was grounds for denouncing them as terrorists.
Why would it be useful to induce fear in a population? Perhaps because a frightened population is more docile. You could then get away with passing laws that repeal their freedoms (in the name, of course, of protecting freedom). Harold Walker commented: ‘It’s amazing to me, given that the United States is a very active sort of democracy, that because of the war on terrorism, the way the reaction to 9/11 was worked out, the Americans have allowed an astonishing array of potential infringements – well, not to mention actual infringements – of their liberties under Homeland Security measures.’ Presumably, indeed, the perpetrators of terrorism have then won, given that they were said to be assaulting liberty in the first place (‘our very freedom came under attack’82). More to the point, they have also won if governments deliberately collude in the strategy of instilling fear in their populations. Lord Steyn, the British law lord, decried ‘the public fear whipped up by the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom since September 11 2001 and their determination to bend established international law to their will and to undermine its essential structures’.83 The London Underground bombings of July 2005 were taken by some commentators to have disproven the idea that official concentration on the threat of terrorism amounted to fearmongering. But it is of course possible for governments to inflate a real threat’s magnitude to the detriment of taking concerted action against other threats, such as the New Orleans hurricane, or pandemics of infectious disease, or the European heatwave of summer 2003, which killed 35,000 people, and about half of whose intensity has been attributed to global warming.84
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nbsp; The idea of the ‘war on terror’ also provided an overarching narrative for unrelated military adventures across the globe, a sort of rhetorical glue. The authors of the 9/11 Commission Report complained: ‘The enemy is not just “terrorism,” some generic evil. This vagueness blurs the strategy. […] It is the threat posed by Islamist terrorism – especially the al Qaeda network, its affiliates, and its ideology.’85 But to blur the strategy was precisely the intention. The vagueness of the phrase was deliberate, because it was not meant to apply just to a fight with Al Qaeda. The writer Mark Massing watched Fox News for several months at the end of 2004, and noticed: ‘Whenever news about Iraq came on, the urgent words “War on Terror” appeared on the screen, thus helping to frame the war exactly as the President did.’86 The choice of ‘terror’ in the slogan rather than ‘terrorism’, as in the Reagan administration’s previous version of it, was useful as it enabled its users to elide any distinction between suicide bombers and repressive dictators. Bush, Rumsfeld, et al. made repeated references to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as both a ‘terror regime’ and a ‘terrorist regime’, so that the invasion could be more easily filed under the rubric of the ‘war on terror’ (so states can commit terrorism after all); meanwhile, the weapon of Al Qaeda was said to be both ‘terrorism’ and ‘terror’. There was for a time a useful distinction available between ‘terror’, understood as the violent actions of a state against its own population (as in La Terreur in revolutionary France), and terrorism, understood as a violent act against civilians intended to coerce a government. The ‘war on terror’ deliberately erased such differences.
It was not just conservative cable news channels that mirrored the language of ‘war on terror’. The Democrats’ 2004 Presidential candidate, John Kerry, did too. Instead of attacking the assumptions contained within the phrase ‘war on terror’, he parrotted it himself, and just limply promised that he would ‘do a better job of waging’ it.87 But clearly Bush was already doing an excellent job of waging it, since there had been no more attacks on American soil, despite the years of flashing yellow and orange lights on the Terrorist Threat Advisory System – which confluence of facts indicated, it would be logical to assume, that countless terrorist plots had been brilliantly foiled. Perhaps some had; and yet for some reason it was never thought appropriate to lower the threat level to ‘Guarded’ (‘General Risk of Terrorist Attacks’), let alone ‘Low’.
More widely, the media in general, along with Tony Blair, adopted the phrase ‘war on terror’ and repeated it uncritically as though it made sense, so contributing to the President’s unending campaign. A few resisted: the BBC Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman tended to say, with a customary sneer, ‘the so-called “war on terror”’,88 while BBC World Service presenter Kirsty Lang, when presented with a script using the phrase, would change it herself: ‘I’m always very careful to use the phrase “President Bush’s war on terror”.’89
Of course, if you have a war, it must be logically possible to win it. As Harold Walker notes: ‘The phrase “war on terrorism” suggests you can defeat terrorism – whatever that is – by military means alone. And that’s largely what I think the Bush administration seemed to think when they started off. And of course, as the poor old British with their long colonial history know, it’s a load of rubbish! You can’t defeat insurgency or terrorists by military means alone. Of course you have to have military means, you have to have police means, but you also have to go for the root causes.’
There is in fact an official explanation of what victory in the war on terror would look like. It came very early on, from Donald Rumsfeld:
Now, what is victory? I say that victory is persuading the American people and the rest of the world that this is not a quick matter that’s going to be over in a month or a year or even five years. It is something that we need to do so that we can continue to live in a world with powerful weapons and with people who are willing to use those powerful weapons. And we can do that as a country. And that would be a victory, in my view.90
It is worth pausing to admire the awesome rhetorical invention on display here. Like a bebop saxophonist, Rumsfeld takes a theme, crawls into it, turns it inside out, and rebuilds it at crazy angles. Translated into simple declarative English, he is saying that the war on terror will be won when everyone is convinced that the war on terror cannot be won in any foreseeable future. Victory is defined as persuading us that victory is impossible. This persuasion appeared to have worked when a Fox News poll in September 2005 found that 62 per cent of Americans thought that they would not see the end of the ‘war on terror’ in their lifetimes.91
‘War on terror’ was also a politically useful phrase in that any action that was said to be a part of it could not properly be called a war itself. After all, wars are not made up of wars; they are made up of battles. We could see this rhetorical strategy in operation in the following remarks made in 2005 by Dr Paula J. Dobriansky, the US Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs:
Democracies are inherently more peaceful than other forms of government. If you look at major, modern conflicts, you will find that none took place between democracies with universal suffrage. In wars between democracies and non-democracies, it is invariably the latter that is the aggressor.92
Hold that thought: invariably, it is non-democracies who attack democracies. But in 2003, the US and Britain, exemplars of modern democracy, entered Iraq with a lot of tanks, helicopters, and so on, having not actually been attacked by that country. How to reconcile these two facts? At first one might think that Dr Dobriansky is in the vanguard of an interesting sociolinguistic change. Perhaps the word ‘invariably’ was always a hostage to fortune: the all-too-potent idea of ‘variable’ is in the process of drowning out that pernickety little negative prefix ‘in-’. Maybe we have come to think of ‘in-’ as a bland intensifier, on analogy with the curious fact that ‘invaluable’, which originally meant ‘incapable of being valued’ and so was used to mean either ‘of the utmost value’ or ‘worthless’, now means simply the same as ‘valuable’. Thus ‘invariably’ comes to mean ‘quite often’, or ‘some of the time’, or ‘whenever I say so’.
But the true message is that the war in Iraq was not actually a war. It was a conflict or a liberation, but not a war. According to Dobriansky elsewhere in her speech, what happened was two things: ‘the coalition forces destroyed Saddam Hussein’s regime and liberated Iraq’. No mention of a war there. Who said ‘war’? Nothing to see here; move along. Helpfully, if what happened in Iraq was not a war, it doesn’t count as disproof of her historical theory.
In fact democracies these days call their own proactive military action by any name other than war. That simply follows the process established when the US Department of War was rolled into the Department of Defense in 1949, and the British War Office swallowed up by the Ministry of Defence in 1964. After all, how could you ever start a war if you’re called ‘Defence’? Indeed, the US Congress has not officially declared war since 1941, though the American military has not quite been idle since; and Parliament has not declared war since 1942.
Refusing to call the actions in Afghanistan or Iraq ‘wars’ had another use. As Parliamentary researcher Andrew Blick pointed out, the constitutions of both Japan and Italy, drawn up after the Second World War, unambiguously renounce the practice of war. ‘Aspiring to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes’; ‘Italy repudiates war as an instrument offending the liberty of the peoples and as a means for settling international disputes.’ Even so, ‘both Italy and Japan managed to participate in the allied operation in Iraq from 2003’,93 although Japanese soldiers did not join offensive operations. There was no contradiction as long as you are careful never to say that what happened in Iraq was a war.
But of course we still do hear the word ‘war’ a lot these days. It’s simply that war
is declared exclusively on abstract nouns or inanimate objects. Terror, drugs, fat, drunk-driving, weeds, the forces of conservatism … Even the reductio ad absurdum of such paradoxical formulations, ‘war on war’, has been a slogan for, among others, V. I. Lenin and Karl Popper. War on Want, the charity whose name was invented by Harold Wilson in 1952, may be to blame for the contemporary popularity of the ‘war on’ trope, though there are even older precedents: in 1918, it was reported that ‘the Government is making war on the cattle tick’.94 One may wearily join in the plea of Ezra Pound’s Count Pitigliano: ‘wd. you not stop making war on / insensible objects’?95
Dr Dobriansky continued this trope with a new name for US foreign policy: the ‘war on tyranny’. Coincidentally enough, a war on tyranny was also what Osama bin Laden said he was conducting. In the 1998 document announcing the formation of the World Islamic Front, he wrote:
There is no doubt that every state and every civilization and culture has had to resort to terrorism under certain circumstances for the purposes of abolishing tyranny and corruption … The terrorism we practise is of the commendable kind for it is directed at the tyrants, the traitors who commit acts of treason against their own countries and against their own faith and their own prophet and their own nation. Terrorizing those are necessary measures to straighten things and make them right.96
It is striking the extent to which the protagonists in the ‘war on terror’ mirror each other’s rhetoric. Of course here bin Laden was attempting to reclaim the idea of terrorism, which for Bush represented unnegotiable evil: he was harking back to the positive use of ‘terrorism’ by French and Russian revolutionaries to describe their own activities. Yet there is no way in which the attacks of 11 September 2001 can be said to have been ‘directed at the tyrants’, since the tyrants in question are Arab rulers, none of whom, so far as it is known, kept offices in the World Trade Center. Nonetheless, bin Laden’s talk of ‘terrorising’ tyrants found its exact analogue in the 2003 American announcement of a ‘Shock and Awe’ campaign against Saddam Hussein and the Republican Guard: this too was an attempt to terrorise a tyrant.